From left, by Mireya Acierto/Getty Images, from Venturelli/WireImage, by Monica Schipper/Getty Images.

On Thursday afternoon, The New York Times published a thorough exposé about the alleged sexual misconduct of producer and executive Harvey Weinstein—one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. The piece contains a number of on-the-record interviews with assistants and other alleged victims, including actress Ashley Judd, whose story kicks off the article. She told the Times, “Women have been talking about Harvey amongst ourselves for a long time, and it’s simply beyond time to have the conversation publicly.”

Many of these stories have been hinted at publicly before, in interviews and blind items—but for reasons that are likely both personal and contractual (the Times alleges he settled with at least eight women), the alleged abuser always went unnamed.

Judd told Variety’s Ramin Setoodeh about her harassment at length as a part of the publication’s Power of Women issue in 2015. Though she declined to give his name, the actress went in-depth on the nature of the harassment:

In my example, there was no casting involved. This was just twirling
the lasso. I think it’s very important to note that I considered
myself empowered. He was very stealth and expert about it. He groomed
me, which is a technical term—Oh, come meet at the hotel for
something to eat. Fine, I show up. Oh, he’s actually in his room. I’m
like, Are you kidding me? I just worked all night. I’m just going to
order cereal. It went on in these stages. It was so disgusting.

He physically lured me by saying, “Oh, help me pick out what I’m going
to wear.” There was a lot that happened between the point of entry and
the bargaining. There was this whole process of bargaining—“Come do
this, come do this, come do this.” And I would say, “No, no, no.” I
have a feeling if this is online and people have the opportunity to
post comments, a lot of the people will say, “Why didn’t you leave the
room?”, which is victim-blaming. When I kept saying no to everything,
there was a huge asymmetry of power and control in that room.

Judd explained that it took awhile to fully realize what happened to her, and also elaborated on her thought process in the months and years after it occurred. “I beat myself up for a while,” she said. “This is another part of the process. We internalize the shame. It really belongs to the person who is the aggressor. And so later, when I was able to see what happened, I thought: Oh god, that’s wrong. That’s sexual harassment. That’s illegal. I was really hard on myself because I didn’t get out of it by saying, ‘O.K. motherf—er, I’m calling the police.‘”

Judd’s story sounds similar to a number of others that have bubbled up over the past few years, making Weinstein’s misconduct one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry. In an interview with BuzzFeed, Rose McGowan seemed to refer to Weinstein’s physicality after reporter Kate Aurthur brought up a “rumored serial predator” in entertainment:

I have faith. There’s a lot of people that don’t deserve
to be alive—put it that way. There’s a lot of people who also get the
face and body they deserve. There’s a lot of destroyers, and there's
the collusion. For anybody who reads this, anybody who’s ever colluded
on anything by being a weak human being, fuck you. How dare you.

McGowan and Aurthur got on the subject after talking about Bill Cosby.

On Thursday, after the Times article went live, McGowan tweeted her thinly veiled response to the story.

The Times reports through anonymous sourcing that Weinstein has reached at least eight settlements around his inappropriate contact. The publication notes that the Weinstein Company had a “code of silence,” and that contracts included a “non-disparagement” clause that applied to the company itself and its leader. Additionally, “most of the women accepting payouts agreed to confidentiality clauses prohibiting them from speaking about the deals or the events that led to them.”